Blast: The disruptive new work from the founder of Blur, can the living-type L2 shake up the track landscape?
At the launch, Blast has completed a $20 million financing round led by Paradigm.Written by: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
On November 21, Blur founder Pacman (Tie Shan) announced the launch of a new project called Blast.
Blast is a Layer 2 network that utilizes the Optimistic Rollup mechanism. With the launch of Blast, Pacman also announced that the project has secured $20 million in funding, with participation from angel investors including Paradigm, Standard Crypto, eGirl Capital, co-founder Andrew Kang of Mechanism Capital, Lido strategic advisor Hasu, and The Block CEO Larry Cermak.
When asked why he wanted to create Blast, Pacman explained that he identified two issues while operating Blur.
- First, as the business volume increased, Blur users incurred huge gas fees for NFT transactions on the Ethereum mainnet, making it necessary to expand the application to a lower-cost Layer 2 network.
- Second, over a hundred million dollars in the Blur bid pool has been passively idle, failing to earn any returns, and this situation exists across almost every application on every chain, meaning that these funds are suffering from passive depreciation due to inflation.
Therefore, Pacman decided to build a new Layer 2 network, Blast, that allows funds within accounts to earn passive interest.
Before explaining how Blast operates, Pacman compared the native staking yield of ETH with the risk-free rate (RFR) in USD. If in the real world your yield does not outperform the RFR, it means your assets will passively depreciate due to inflation; similarly, in the on-chain world, ETH has a stable staking yield of 3%-4%, but most funds in Layer 2 accounts are just sitting idle (yield 0%), meaning these assets are passively depreciating due to ETH inflation.
Blast aims to solve this problem by providing the possibility of passive interest for funds in Layer 2 accounts.
Specifically, when users deposit funds into Blast, it will immediately lock the corresponding ETH on the Layer 1 network for native staking and automatically return the ETH staking rewards to users on Blast. In short, if a user holds 1 ETH in their Blast account, over time it may automatically grow to 1.04, 1.08, or 1.12 ETH.
In addition to ETH that can participate in native staking, Blast also supports passive interest for stablecoins. The specific mechanism is that when users bridge stablecoins (such as USDC, USDT, and DAI) to Blast, it will immediately deposit the corresponding stablecoins locked on the Layer 1 network into DeFi protocols like MakerDAO, and automatically return the earnings to users on Blast in the form of USDB (Blast's native stablecoin).
Pacman further explained that Blast's vision is not just to serve Blur, but to support all types of Dapps, such as DEX, lending, derivatives trading, NFTFi, and even SocialFi.
Compared to typical Layer 2 solutions, Blast, as an Optimistic Rollup, continues the operational inertia of EVM users while providing users with a brand new revenue window.
Pacman summarized that Layer 2 is not just an execution environment, but also a liquidity environment, and that Blast, with its native yield, will unlock new possibilities for on-chain finance.
According to Blast's official introduction, the network has now opened early access (Blast Early Access), but only invited users can access it.
Once users enter the Blast network through early access, they can immediately enjoy passive interest of 4% on ETH or 5% on stablecoins, while also accumulating Blast Points rewards.
As for the future timeline, Blast plans to launch its mainnet and develop withdrawals on February 24 next year, and open the "redemption" of Blast Points (the term used in the original text) on May 24.
Currently, many users who have obtained early access qualifications are sharing invitation codes on social media. Interested users might want to keep an eye on the information flow to see if they can grab an early participation qualification.
